The Lost Decade: How the Democratic Process went on Hiatus in Australia

Yet in recent years, democracy in Australia has weakened. It seems as if the people’s choice in who runs their country has been taken away: it has now been ten years since a Prime Minister has served a full first term, the last to do so being John Howard in 2007 after he himself served for over ten years. This period of stability has since been replaced by political upheaval and has ushered in a popular loss of faith in Australian politics.

This ‘lost decade,’ as it is called in Australian politics, also extends itself to normal political behaviour, as a series of depositions and replacements have changed the seat of the Prime Minister five times between four individuals.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who was ousted as Prime Minister in 2010 by his deputy Julia Gillard before ousting her in 2013 for the same position.https://flic.kr/p/aNx8yk

In 2010, Rudd was ousted in a leadership vote less than a month before the federal election by none other than his own deputy, Julia Gillard. While Gillard arguably ‘broke through the glass ceiling’ by becoming Australia’s first female prime minister, many never fully supported her due to how she arrived there. Her brazen takeover kick-started what would become a cycle of political backstabbing, shocking a public unaccustomed to blood in political waters.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who ousted Rudd to become Australia’s first female Prime Minister.https://flic.kr/p/8rou28

Rudd himself never forgave Gillard for what he considered a very personal betrayal, and after one failed attempt three months earlier, he exacted his revenge in June 2013. Less than three months before the 2013 federal election, Rudd returned to the office of Prime Minister.

While many had hope in Abbott’s government after six years of Labour’s back-and-forth, they would soon be disenchanted with the Liberals as well. The Liberal Party would prove to be not much different, as the politics of who held power and their popularity would trump the wishes of the people.Promises that the party and Abbott had run on were broken only nine months into his term when he unveiled his first budget. It was after this single document, which cut hospital funding, introduced new taxes, and curbed pension entitlements, and cut education funding by $80 billion, that Abbott’s decline in the polls first began. Though Abbott’s decline in the polls continued steadily afterward, the Liberal Party did not decide to give him a potentially redemptive finish to his term.

With Turnbull’s ‘appointment,’ Australian politics seemed to come full circle: Turnbull was the leader of the Liberal Party once before from 2008 to 2009, until he decided to support Kevin Rudd’s plan for emissions trading. This support caused a split in policy within the party and led to his ousting by none other than Abbott – whose favour he would return six years later.

While Turnbull and the Liberal Party won the 2016 federal election, has the perennial backstabbing truly ceased? The incumbent Prime Minister still has a couple years left to serve the first full term in over a decade.

While the last ten years have also featured a swing from Labor to Liberal, it is clear that many Australians have grown tired of this cyclical backstabbing. In a recent survey by the Australian National University (ANU), participants rated the three major political parties on a scale from zero to ten, with zero being a high dislike and 10 being highly liked, scoring the Labor Party a 4.9, the Liberal Party a 4.8, and Nationals a 4.4. Simultaneously, Australians are increasingly turning to smaller parties over these major parties, as they consider them to be more trustworthy: recent 2017 opinion polls show that 20 percent of people would vote for the Greens or the One Nation Party. If Australian politics don’t soon stabilize, it is not outlandish to think that the vote for both Labor and Liberal may seriously weaken.

Satisfaction with democracy, data from the Australian Election Study 2016.http://www.australianelectionstudy.org/

While the path has been different than the rest of the Western world, the result is the same: faith in democracy has been shaken and is in question. This should be a concern which transcends ones’ political alignment or beliefs: left, right, or centre. In a time where trade deals are being overturned, protecting the environment is being abandoned, and fear has become politicised, political stability may be what Australians need the most.

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1 Comment

abner
July 8, 2017

Missing from this analysis is the acknowledgment that Gillard, Rudd (the 2nd time around), Abbott, and Turnbull have all led–effectively, once the makeup of the Senate was taken into effect–“minority governments”. While each successive PM in that group has commanded majorities in the lower House of Parliament, allowing substantial control of origination of new law and policy, none has fully controlled the Senate since the late 2010 election, Gillard’s second ministry.

And that’s a new development in Australian federal politics, one which neither of the traditional leading parties has handled particularly well. The Australian parliament is bicameral, and the voting system for the Senate currently favours small regionally-focused, interest-based parties who are clever at maximising preference-based vote harvesting. Successful Senate candidates from minor parties are rarely assured of future re-election, so they tend to offer their votes to support one government initiative or another transactionally.

So one might expect that Australian PMs and other leading politicians from mainstream parties would learn the diplomacy and coalition-building skills required of politicians in democracies featuring proportional representation, now that the makeup of the Australian Senate resembles that. But sadly, so far that has yet to occur.